The Economic Policy Institute Blog

The Economic Policy Institute, a nonprofit Washington D.C. think tank, was created in 1986 to broaden the discussion about economic policy to include the interests of low- and middle-income workers. Learn more »

The Emergency Unemployment Compensation (EUC) program, part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, is a federally-funded program that provides unemployment insurance (UI) benefits to the millions of Americans who lost their jobs in the Great Recession and who have exhausted or no longer qualify for unemployment benefits through existing state programs. With the anemic pace of job growth since the recession’s end, millions of unemployed Americans are still relying on these benefits to support themselves and their families. As the country is painfully aware, the job market is not recovering quickly enough to put these people back into jobs, and the EUC program is set to expire at the end of this year.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, extending UI benefits through 2012 would cost about $45 billion. But as EPI’s Larry Mishel and Heidi Shierholz explain, this $45 billion in federal spending would translate into an additional $72 billion in U.S. economic activity, or a 0.5 percent increase in GDP, due to standard economic “multiplier” effects and the fact that the long-term unemployed—often the most desperate for resources to meet their basic needs—are apt to immediately spend any benefits received.

From a jobs standpoint, this additional $72 billion in economic activity will save or create about 560,000 jobs across the country. How would your state be affected? The table below estimates the share of these 560,000 jobs saved or created in each state based upon the size of the state’s economy and its share of previous federal EUC spending. Not surprisingly, California has the most at stake – about 80,000 jobs. New York, Texas, Florida, and Pennsylvania will each save over 27,000 jobs.

One other way to look at these jobs numbers is as a share of each state’s payroll employment to control for the differences in the size of each state’s workforce. As the highlighted cells show, New Jersey, Connecticut, Nevada, Colorado, and Massachusetts will see the largest job loss as a proportion of state payroll employment if the EUC program is not extended.

The deadline for the supercommittee is approaching, and so we welcome budget ideas from our friend and former board member, Andy Stern. But he and Reagan OMB Director David Stockman are advising the supercommittee to “go big” on deficit reduction, based on the false premise that “our debt crisis is so severe, so obvious,” in this CNN opinion piece. In Washington parlance, that means $4 trillion plus in deficit reduction, heavily weighted toward spending cuts. The economic crisis we face today is not a debt crisis at all. We have a jobs crisis, and that is why we currently have large fiscal deficits. In today’s economic context, the most compelling case for long-term deficit reduction is to finance greater efforts to create jobs in the short term. Invoking a debt crisis that is not happening, however, can only lead to a rush for changes that need not be addressed in the short, nontransparent process of the supercommittee and are likely to do needless damage to our retirement and health programs, if not the economic recovery altogether.

Our economic crisis is so severe, so obvious, that it is visible in just about every U.S. data release. Unemployment has been stuck at or above 8.8% for over two and a half years. The economy and employment are growing too slowly to lower the unemployment rate. Poverty is rising, and real median incomes are falling. The economy is running $895 billion (-5.6%) below potential, which singlehandedly accounts for roughly a third of the budget deficit.

We do face real long-term fiscal challenges that must be addressed. Along with Demos and The Century Foundation, EPI drafted a long-term budget for economic recovery and fiscal responsibility. We should address the health cost escalation but having just witnessed a yearlong process to achieve health care reform (at the time, the biggest piece of deficit-reduction legislation in over a decade), one wonders why this supercommittee should revise our health care system again—likely undermining reform—even before we see the results of reform. Social Security is not in any crisis and there is no need for its long-term fiscal challenge to be addressed in this process, either. We must restore revenue adequacy, but the prospects of the supercommittee doing so are zilch. Stern’s piece with Stockman does contribute to that effort by getting a prominent Republican on the record for substantial revenue increases (which is presumably what the point was, at least for Stern). But if long-term fiscal challenges misguidedly produce premature withdrawal of fiscal support and near-term spending cuts, as looks all too likely, both economic recovery and fiscal sustainability will remain elusive. Those genuinely concerned with long-term fiscal sustainability should pay attention to the economic crisis at hand, the jobs crisis, since we will never have a sustainable fiscal situation with the persistent high unemployment we are facing.

As Republicans in Congress intensify their attacks on EPA rules, largely on the grounds they disrupt the economy, it is important to keep in mind that in terms of the overall economy, these rules are essentially inconsequential. Previously I’ve blogged on how the total compliance costs of all the major rules proposed or finalized by EPA so far during the Obama administration amount to only about one-tenth of one percent of the U.S. economy. What I failed to quantify is how the 0.1 percent figure itself, as small as it is, significantly overstates the potential economic effect of the rules.

This can be demonstrated by looking at the economic benefits of just two of the rules finalized so far by EPA. These are joint rules with the Department of Transportation that regulate greenhouse gas emissions from, and establish fuel standards for, various-size vehicles for model years 2012-2016. The economic benefits from these two rules are particularly sizable, as they produce large savings to drivers in the form of reduced expenditures on gasoline.

In 2010 dollars, a conservative estimate (see explanation below) of the economic benefits from these two rules amounts to $6 billion to $20.6 billion a year. This range is above the range of estimated compliance costs for all 11 major rules finalized so far by the Obama EPA; that range is $5.9 billion to $12 billion a year. Even if the four major proposed rules are also taken into account, the economic benefits from the fuel standard rules alone offset much of the combined costs of the final and proposed rules ($19.7 billion to $27 billion a year).

Stated simply, the economic benefits of just two of the major Obama EPA rules offset much of the economic compliance costs of all the rules. It also bears noting that companies have several years or more to comply with the rules, diminishing immediate costs and facilitating transitions. Further, an array of economic benefits is not considered here, including the economic benefits from the other nine final rules and the four proposed rules; these economic benefits range from workers spending more time at their jobs because they or their children are healthier to reduced expenditures on health care. The modest employment gains from the largest rule, the air toxics rule, are also not considered; these gains reflect the fact that compliance expenditures generate jobs when the economy has substantial unused capacity.

So especially once offsetting economic benefits are considered, it is hard to conceive how the EPA rules advanced so far during the Obama administration could drag down the overall economy.

What is conceivable, and indisputable, is that the health benefits from these rules are large. Every year, the cleaner air and other environmental benefits from the rules will save tens of thousands of lives, prevent tens of thousands of heart attacks, and mean hundreds of thousands fewer people will contract respiratory illnesses, thereby diminishing hospital stays. When all benefits, including health benefits, are considered, the benefits from the rules dwarf any compliance costs.

Note: Explanation of calculation. For the two rules that raise fuel standards for, and reduce greenhouse gas emissions from, various-sized vehicles, this blog considers the following benefits as economic: reductions in fuel expenditures, the value of time savings from needing to refuel less often, and the value of the decreased chance of economic disruption due to reduced dependence on foreign oil. The costs of time lost due to increased congestion (due to more driving since fuel costs less) and the costs of increased crashes (also reflecting more driving) are considered economic losses. The additional value drivers attach to driving more are not considered economic, nor are the costs assigned to increased traffic noise (reflecting more driving). The method is conservative because due to technical obstacles, no economic benefits are attached to reducing carbon dioxide or other emissions. Additionally, the health benefits from these rules, which EPA calculated for 2030 and did not annualize, are not included in the calculation.

One of the arguments marshaled by the Occupy Wall Street movement is that corporate executives have seen pay increases far in excess of those enjoyed by typical workers. To be clear, CEOs have always earned much higher salaries than the workers they manage, but the gap between CEO and worker pay has soared in recent decades.

The figure below shows the ratio of average CEO compensation to compensation of the average worker from 1965–2010. In 1978, compensation of CEOs was 35 times greater than compensation of average workers. Since then, this ratio has skyrocketed, peaking at 299-to-1 in 2000. During the Great Recession, CEO pay fell relative to pay of typical workers because much of CEO compensation is directly linked to the stock market, which fell sharply in 2008 and 2009. However, the ratio bounced back during the recovery and stood at 243-to-1 in 2010. At this rate, it likely will not take long for the gap to reach its prior peak.

There was a lot of good news last night and some great headlines this morning. But here’s one of my favorites, via Fox News Latino, and not just because it references one of (immigrant former governor) Arnold Schwarzenegger’s best films:

Conservative voters in Arizona may have had enough of their immigrant-bashing elected officials, it seems. Arizonans confirmed that Arizona Senate President Russell Pearce had gone too far by sponsoring and pushing hard for the passage and implementation of SB 1070, an insanely draconian (and likely unconstitutional) anti-immigrant, anti-Latino law that facilitates racial profiling.

Arizona is also home to controversial, attention-loving Sheriff Joe Arpaio (pictured above on the right), an ardent supporter of Russell Pearce and vocal proponent of SB 1070. Arpaio has personified the extremist elements in the state that support SB 1070, and his questionable enforcement tactics have earned him criticism from Amnesty International for the harsh treatment of prisoners. His actions, which recently included forcing an immigrant detainee to give birth while handcuffed and shackled, are the subject of two federal investigations, one by the Department of Justice over civil rights violations and another by a federal grand jury for abuse of power.

The recall vote, the first ever recall of an Arizona state legislator, is being heralded as a rejection of the policies and tactics embodied in SB 1070.

Pearce lost the election last night in his conservative suburban Phoenix district to a political newcomer, fellow Republican Jerry Lewis. Pearce lost by a substantial margin of seven percent, despite having outspent Lewis by a 3-to-1 ratio, thanks to a flood of campaign funds donated by corporate lobbyists, 90 percent of which came from outside the district.

Legislators in other states – most notably Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, and Indiana – who have targeted immigrant workers and their families for political gain or because of intense lobbying from corporate interests, including and especially from the private prison industry – are now officially on notice. If you strive to terrorize law-abiding immigrants and Latinos who simply wish to work to provide food and shelter for their families, responsible voters will not allow you to remain in power, no matter how much money you get from the special interests you champion.

This is the second part of a two-part blog prompted by an alarmist Washington Post article on Social Security, as well as the Post ombudsman’s muddleheaded response. Last Wednesday, we looked at links between the Social Security surplus (and future deficit) and the overall federal deficit and debt. Today, we’ll look at the impact of the Great Recession on Social Security and whether the fact that Social Security is now running a primary deficit will add to the nation’s budget problems, as Post reporter Lori Montgomery claims.

How have the Great Recession and weak recovery affected Social Security to date?

Compared to intermediate projections in the last prerecession (2007) trustees report, the number of workers covered by Social Security last year was down seven percent and the number of beneficiaries was up one percent in 2010, according to the latest report. The cumulative impact was that the Social Security trust fund held $2.6 trillion at the end of 2010 rather than the $2.9 trillion projected in the 2007 report.

How will the recession and weak recovery affect the future of the trust fund?

The Social Security actuaries project slower economic growth over the next decade, though long-run assumptions remain unchanged. As a result of lower projected employment growth, wage growth and other factors, the trust fund is expected to peak at around $3.7 trillion rather than the $6.0 trillion projected in 2007 and to be exhausted five years sooner—in 2036 rather than 2041.

How will the recession affect Social Security’s long-run outlook?

Because benefits are mostly paid out of current tax revenues as opposed to savings, Social Security’s long-run outlook isn’t as affected as one might think if focusing only on the trust fund. The 2011 report projected a 75-year shortfall equal to 2.22 percent of taxable payroll, an increase from 1.95 percent in the 2007 report (some of this is due to the changing 75-year projection period and other factors besides the weak economy). This means that a relatively modest increase in the Social Security tax on employers and employees from 6.2 percent to around 7.3 percent of earnings would put the program in long-term balance, though more progressive revenue options, like lifting the cap on taxable earnings, would be preferable.

Why do some people say Social Security is already running a deficit?

Social Security had $781 billion in revenues in 2010. Of this, $637 billion was revenue from payroll taxes and $118 billion was interest on trust fund assets. Meanwhile, Social Security had $713 billion in expenditures, the bulk of which ($702 billion) was paid out in Social Security benefits. Since current tax revenues no longer cover current expenditures, Social Security is running what’s known as a primary deficit (sometimes referred to as a “cash-flow” deficit) even though it is still building up savings in the trust fund.

What’s the significance of this cash-flow deficit, if any?

By definition, Social Security will run a deficit when it taps into its savings to help pay for the Baby Boomer retirement. Running a primary deficit is a normal stage in the process of moving from saving to dissaving. The fact that this is happening sooner than expected is actually beneficial in the short run—since Social Security serves as an automatic stabilizer for the economy. Older workers tapping retirement benefits when they lose their jobs helps them and the sputtering economy—and does so at no cost to Social Security since benefits are adjusted for early retirement. Lower-than-anticipated payroll tax revenues do, however, add modestly to the system’s long-run challenges.

Does this “add to the nation’s budget problems?”

As explained last week, Social Security cannot contribute to the federal debt over time because it is prohibited from borrowing. This is analogous to a family with indebted parents and a thrifty child who is saving money from a newspaper route. When the child dips into her piggy bank to buy a bike, she’s contributing to her family’s “deficit” simply by tapping into her savings. She’s also adding to her family’s net indebtedness because there are now fewer savings in her piggy bank to offset her parents’ credit card debt. However, it would be absurd to hold the child responsible for her parents’ mounting debt.

The SPM attempts a more holistic appraisal of family expenses. It takes the average between the 30th and 36th percentiles of spending by a family of three on food, clothing, shelter, and utilities, and adjusts this amount to reflect other necessary expenses, such as child care, federal income taxes, FICA payroll taxes, out-of-pocket medical expenses, and work-related expenses such as commuting costs, uniforms, and tools. At the same time, the SPM also accounts for resources available to low-income families through government programs, like the EITC, SNAP (food stamps), housing subsidies, school lunch programs, heating assistance, and WIC (food assistance for women, infants, and children). Finally, unlike the existing official poverty rate, the SPM does adjust for regional differences in prices and costs.

How do poverty levels under the SPM compare to those under the official poverty threshold?

Moreover, the figure below highlights changes in the distribution of people by the ratio of their income to the poverty line. Note the enormous growth in the number of people with incomes 1.0 to 1.99 times the poverty threshold. This means that the number of Americans with incomes at or below 200 percent of the poverty line—a level often thought of as an adequate, but modest standard of living – rises from 34 percent under the official measure to 47.5 percent under the SPM. That’s nearly half of all Americans.

Why are so many more people closer to poverty under this new measure?

One clear reason is that the official poverty line’s method of pegging the poverty threshold to three times a minimum food bundle assumes that the growth in all expenses other than food will remain proportionate to the growth in food costs. But we know this is not true: case in point, healthcare. In fact, the SPM report shows that when you factor in individuals’ out-of-pocket medical expenses, it increases the poverty rate by 3.3 percentage points – in other words, the poverty rate would be 12.7 percent instead of 16 percent if individuals faced no medical costs. This contrast is even starker for seniors. Without accounting for out-of-pocket medical expenses, the poverty rate for seniors would be 8.6 percent; once you factor in medical costs, the poverty rate among seniors jumps to 15.9 percent! (Let this be a big warning to policymakers advocating benefit cuts to seniors, under the illusion that the current indexing of benefits has been too generous.)

There’s another interesting point to be made when you look at the effect that the additional necessary expenses (childcare, payroll taxes, etc.) and government-provided resources (EITC, SNAP, etc.) has upon the estimated poverty rate. The sum of the effects of the additional government-provided resources is to lower the SPM rate by 5.2 percentage points. However, the sum of the effects of all the additional expenses is to increase the SPM rate by 6.7 percentage points. So on net, the additional expenses that families face are overshadowing the benefits that government programs provide at a level sufficient to raise the poverty rate by 1.5 percentage points. At a time when so much of the political discourse is on reducing and eliminating federal programs, this finding at least suggests that the question should not be which programs to cut, but whether the programs we currently have to combat poverty are actually doing enough.

The Census Bureau acknowledges that the new measure is a “work in progress” and there are certainly some glaring concerns about the SPM that other researchers have dutifully pointed out. On a more fundamental level, there will always be questions around measures that define poverty in quasi-absolute terms. Simply because a family is spending on healthcare (childcare, food, shelter) at a level commensurate with the 33rd percentile of spending does not mean that they are receiving adequate healthcare. For these reasons, the SPM may be one step towards better ways of identifying poverty, but it cannot and should not be the end of the conversation.

Ohio’s landslide rejection of SB 5, a law that attacked the right of employees to engage in collective bargaining, a core human right, shows that conservatives there and elsewhere have gone too far. Americans know that unions, which have been crushed by big business, conservative courts, and right-wing politicians, are not the cause of the nation’s economic woes. Rather, unions are a hope for the 99 percent to hang on to what they have and preserve the middle class that they helped build.

House Republicans, who are attacking collective bargaining and the NLRB, the agency that protects the right to join unions and bargain collectively, should take heed. They are going down the same dead-end road as Gov. John Kasich in Ohio, and Americans won’t follow them.

I’ve generally been a fan of Planet Money – and still refer people to ‘another frightening show about the economy’ for a good summary of what led people to get so panicky in Sept. 2008. So, I’m afraid I find Adam Davidson’s first New York TimesMagazine column – titled “It’s the economy” and labeled an exercise in “[trying] to demystify complicated economic issues…” – to be pretty disappointing.

He covers a lot of ground, so my list of disagreements is going to be scattershot, but here’s a quick taxonomy. First, I don’t buy his characterizations about what is generally agreed upon and what is seriously contested among economists. Second, he really undersells how well studied the concept of providing Keynesian-style fiscal support to ailing economies is. Finally, he doesn’t help readers in their attempt to make an evidence-based decision on what is easily the most important economics question today: Should Congress and the Administration be spending more to help lower today’s 9 percent unemployment rate?

Let’s start with the general – Davidson portrays economists as hopelessly divided and unsure about whether or not debt-financed spending and tax cuts (i.e., something like another Recovery Act, which I’ll just call “fiscal support” from now on) could lower today’s unemployment rate, but relatively united when it comes to how to reform taxes and education and health care systems.

This is the reverse of the truth – there is wide agreement that debt-financed fiscal support in a depressed economy will lower unemployment. Now, it’s true that there are holdouts from this position. And others who think the benefits of lower unemployment are swamped by the downsides of higher public debt (they’re wrong, by the way). But, the agreement* is much more widespread – ask literally any economic forecaster, in the public or private sector, that a casual reader of the Financial Times has heard of if, say, the Recovery Act boosted economic growth. They will all tell you “yes.”

You won’t find anywhere near such a consensus on long-run tax or education or health care policy. In fact, public finance economists can’t get unanimous agreement on if, in the long run, income accruing to holders of wealth should be taxed at all (it should, by the way). In short, anybody waiting for the current unpleasantness to pass and for economists to unite in harmony in future policy debates shouldn’t hold their breath.

Davidson also claims that there is wide agreement that “many Americans don’t know how to do anything that the world is willing to pay them a living wage for.” I’m not quite sure what this means. I guess it’s true in the strictly tautological sense that there are a lot of involuntarily unemployed workers out there, but if it is meant to be an indictment of American workers’ skills (and it’s hard for me not to read it that way) – then there’s no serious basis for this indictment.

Most distressingly, Davidson doesn’t rise above the “opinions on the shape of the world differ” review of the argument about the virtues of debt-financed fiscal support as the answer to today’s unemployment crisis. He writes as if this argument has lain completely unstudied since the Great Depression and that advocates for fiscal support in the last three years have taken a huge leap of faith in pushing it as the answer to today’s troubles. This is, again, so at odds with what has actually gone on in the profession that it’s hard to figure out his basis for claiming it. If nothing else, the experience of Japan’sLostDecade alone has inspired thousands of pages on recessions (and jobless recoveries) driven by deficient demand. And no, a Google or Lexis search on “job creation” won’t actually capture all academic work relevant to this.

He also writes that the point of large-scale fiscal support was to “goad consumers into spending again.” Not really. A good chunk of the Recovery Act was indeed aimed at households, but it didn’t rely on some esoteric trick to bamboozle people into spending – instead it gave them money (or its near equivalent). And much of the most-effective parts of the Recovery Act actually recognized that consumers were unlikely to begin spending again and had the government spend the money directly. The recession was largely caused by consumer retrenchment, but this doesn’t mean that recovery has to come through consumer spending – instead we can provide the spending power through other sectors.

Lastly, Davidson notes that there is a rump of economists (he calls them, reasonably enough, the Chicago School) that argue that debt-financed fiscal support cannot help economies recover from recessions. But, it’s important to note that there is pretty simple evidence that can be brought to bear on this Keynesian versus Chicago debate. Nobody denies, for example, that the government could borrow money and just hire lots of people – hence creating jobs. What the Chicago school argues is that this borrowing will raise interest rates (new demand for loans will increase their “price,” or interest rates) and this increase in interest rates will dampen private-sector demand. But interest rates have not risen at all since the Recovery Act was passed and private investment has risen, a lot.

Those in the demystifying business really should point lots of this stuff out.

*Note: The Kaufmann survey describes the results wrong – any multiplier greater than zero means that debt-financed fiscal support has boosted the economy.

The Senate appears poised to pass two components of President Obama’s American Jobs Act, having found the first area of bipartisan agreement. These two components, however, fall woefully short of what is needed to address the jobs crisis.

The first provision would provide tax credits for hiring veterans, with bigger credits for hiring veterans who have been out of work for more than six months and those with service-related disabilities. It would also expand education and training opportunities for up to 100,000 older veterans. Helping veterans find employment or vocational training is a laudable goal. The problem is that this hiring credit is a rounding error in terms of national economic activity and will not visibly budge the dial on the national unemployment rate.

As Larry Mishel recently pointed out, scale is critical to evaluating any jobs plan. The president proposed a $447 billion jobs bill that would boost employment by 1.9 million jobs and reduce the unemployment rate a percentage point, according to Mark Zandi. The $1.6 billion cost of the Senate’s bill for veterans, on the other hand, represents only one-hundredth of one percent of GDP.

Worse, a second provision would repeal a requirement that, starting in 2013, will withhold 3 percent of payments to government contractors, in the form of a credit against contractors’ tax liability they already owe. Essentially, the cost of helping veterans is simultaneously helping government contractors avoid taxes. Of course, the increased tax avoidance would cost money – but the Senate provided a “pay-for” in the form of decreasing eligibility for Medicaid and subsidies for those seeking to buy health insurance under the Affordable Care Act (i.e., the health reform bill passed at the beginning of 2010).

So, to recap, the big “jobs-plan” coming out of the Senate today would help veterans (good), but would not move the dial on overall joblessness (bad), would facilitate tax avoidance by government contractors (bad), and would pay for this loss in tax revenue by eroding some of the benefits of health reform (bad). Will this pass? Probably—so much for the alleged benefits of bipartisanship. The likely success of this legislation owes first and foremost to the fact that it would not be paid for with a millionaires’ surtax. Over the last month, Senate Republicans have filibustered all of the following measures, which would have been paid for with varying surtaxes on incomes of more than $1 million:

Helping some of the 240,000 unemployed veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is merited, but so is helping the broader pool of 25 million un- and underemployed Americans. As we have pointed out over and over again, boosting GDP growth in a $15.2 trillion economy and seriously tackling persistent underemployment requires hundreds of billions of dollars in additional fiscal support. Republicans in the 112th Congress, however, have filibustered (or blocked through other procedural means) all job creation proposals that would provide any meaningful help ameliorating the jobs crisis.

Just a reminder: The market will literally pay us to borrow money from them for 5, 7 or 10 years. Pretty good deal for a country that has, say, trillions of dollars in infrastructure repairs it needs to make, or millions of workers who are unnecessarily unemployed. More here.

Here are the real interest rates on Treasury’s TIPS (click to enlarge):

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its monthly report with the most recent data on jobs and employment in the United States, a bleak reminder that things aren’t getting much better for the unemployed in this country. Sadly, as the International Labor Organization’s annual World of Work report reveals, the world economy is no better, and the risk of social unrest has increased dramatically in rich countries as a result (see figure below). The ILO’s calculations are based on “levels of discontent over the lack of jobs and anger over perceptions that the burden of the crisis is not being shared fairly.”

Click to enlarge

Just in the past year, we’ve seen violent clashes erupt between protestors and police in London, New York, Rome, and Oakland as a direct result of citizens protesting budget austerity, joblessness and a sputtering economic recovery. And in encampments literally all over the world people are peacefully protesting income inequality and widespread joblessness as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement. Thanks to a 17 percent youth unemployment rate in the U.S., young people in New York, Tulsa, Sacramento, Philadelphia, Minneapolis and elsewhere have plenty of time on their hands to protest and make their voices heard. Even recent college graduates have an unemployment rate that’s almost double what it was before the recession.

But just because they’re peaceful does not mean the OWS protestors are not seething with anger about the way that high level executives in the financial services industry – who are some of the wealthiest people in the world (better known as “part of the 1 percent”), have escaped prosecution or serving any jail time after bringing our economy to the brink of collapse, while the industry as a whole somehow managed to escape serious reform by Congress.

One of the other principal gripes of the peaceful OWS protestors is that Congress has failed to do almost anything to invest in the economy or create jobs since the stimulus package was passed in 2009, despite persistent joblessness and underemployment. Foreign governments in other developed countries have failed at this as well – and the discontent is palpable. Just look at the scale of protests in Spain, spurred in part by the country’s eye-popping 46 percent youth unemployment rate.

From most reports, it appears that the OWS protestors are committed to remaining peaceful – for now. Let’s hope it stays that way, despite this new evidence that things may deteriorate if economic conditions fail to improve.

My colleagues at EPI recently outlined how the grievances of the Occupy Wall Streeters are fact-based and supported by ample evidence. The ILO’s 2011 World of Work report offers a new estimate that should motivate 99 percent of the global population to join together into one massive movement that challenges the financial and political elite to enact policies that will put people back to work around the world. The table below is the ILO’s estimate that by 2013, there will be a global shortage of 40 million jobs – that’s a lot of desperate, hungry people with way too much time on their hands.

In a blog post yesterday, Paul Krugman again noted that the growth in income inequality is not all about education.

He pointed to two different charts to illustrate: one showing the growth of the top 1 percent relative to other income groups and a second with wage growth by education levels. Since the two charts had different scales, it was hard to see just how out of whack the education-explains-inequality story really is.

Below is a chart that combines the two series in one chart, showing that the top 1 percent has outpaced, by a very wide margin, not just those with less formal education, but college grads as well. And this gap between the growth of the top 1 percent and the rest is much larger than the growth gap between education levels.

This is not to say that education is not important. The chart also shows that those with a college (or post-secondary) degree have outpaced others. But it’s also clear that this trend only explains a small part of the broader inequality story.

As Americans wrap their heads around the meaning of the growing “Occupy” movements in cities throughout the nation, trying to determine whether or not the 99 percent vs 1 percent breakdown of Americans constitutes “class warfare,” there are a great many irrefutable facts that need to inform such discussions. Many have been clearly articulated recently, (including this great collection by my EPI colleagues). In this blog post, I begin a renewed examination of how the decline of manufacturing employment has contributed to the erosion of the American middle class, and in the process, left many state economies in shambles.

Manufacturing provides middle-class jobs and a channel of upward mobility for non-college-educated workers (especially men). Compensation is higher and fringe benefits (such as health insurance and pension coverage) are more common than in other industries that, like manufacturing, employ non-college graduates. Blue-collar workers in manufacturing are also more likely to be union members, and thus they have more bargaining power than do comparable workers in services.

In 1999, there were troubling signs that all was not well in the American manufacturing sector, with the “Asian crisis” identified as a growing threat; a threat which my colleague Rob Scott has repeatedly shown to have continued to erode American employment (see, for example, Growing U.S. trade deficit with China cost 2.8 million jobs between 2001 and 2010). The alarming decline of the American manufacturing sector has of course only gotten worse over the intervening decade, leaving in its wake many state economies that have yet to recover. Since Jan. 2000, the American manufacturing sector has lost 5.5 million jobs, nearly a third (32.1 percent) of the Jan. 2000 total. Six states – Michigan, North Carolina, Rhode Island, Mississippi, New Jersey, and New York – have lost over 40 percent of their manufacturing workforce, while another five states have lost more than 37 percent of their manufacturing employment (collectively, the dark red states in the figure below). Indeed, only Alaska has seen growth in its manufacturing sector since 2000, though numbering less than 2,000 workers.

Click to enlarge

In future posts, I’ll examine the impact the erosion of manufacturing employment has had on wage trends in those states that have been hardest hit by the decimation of manufacturing employment. Lest readers despair, here are some concrete suggestions for what can be done to breathe new life into American manufacturing:

Washington Post reporter Lori Montgomery’s recent article on Social Security’s finances has been the subject of blistering critiques by Dean Baker, Paul Krugman, and others who rightly point out that her opinions belong on the editorial page, not the front page. But Social Security’s finances have also tripped up more even-handed observers. To help the genuinely perplexed, here’s a primer on Social Security and the federal deficit (for a more in-depth discussion, go here). A follow-up blog post will look at the impact of the recession and explain the meaning of Social Security’s primary (or “cash-flow”) deficit.

Does running a deficit mean you’re piling up debt?

Not necessarily. You can be rich as Croesus and still be running a deficit. All it means is that you’re spending more than you’re taking in over a specified period, whether by borrowing or drawing down savings.

Is Social Security running a deficit?

No. Social Security is running a surplus. Its combined revenue sources – payroll taxes, interest from the trust fund, and earmarked income taxes on some Social Security benefits – are still larger than benefit payments. The trust fund, which currently has $2.6 trillion dollars, is projected to grow to around $3.7 trillion in 2022. But once Social Security starts drawing down the principle in the trust fund to help pay for the Baby Boomer retirement, Social Security will be running a deficit. Also, as will be explained at greater length in our second blog post, Social Security is currently running a primary deficit, which means it would be running a deficit absent the interest on the trust fund.

Is drawing down the trust fund a bad thing?

No, that’s what it’s there for. Social Security is structured as a pay-as-you-go program, with current benefits mostly paid out of the revenue from current payroll taxes. With steady population growth, the trust fund would only need enough to handle normal cash flow, like a checking account. However, for nearly a generation significant savings were built up in the trust fund and are now there to handle the demographic “bulge” of the Baby Boomers’ retirement. The fact that Social Security will tap the trust fund to help pay for the Boomers only comes as a surprise to people like Alan Simpson.

Can Social Security contribute to the federal deficit?

It can, if you’re looking at a unified federal budget. By law, Social Security isn’t considered part of the federal budget since it has dedicated funding. But it can be useful to consider the federal government as a whole, including off-budget programs like Social Security. If you do, Social Security’s surplus or deficit contributes to the unified federal budget surplus or deficit.

Can Social Security contribute to the federal debt?

No. Social Security is prevented by law from borrowing—it can only draw down savings in the trust fund. Since Social Security must operate in long-term balance, it can’t contribute to the federal debt over time. This is true whether you consider Social Security as part of a unified federal budget or as a stand-alone program. (more…)

I apologize for continuing to harp on this Rick Perry study, but I just can’t help myself. As I mentioned in an earlier post, the first thing that really jumps out at you is the breathtaking intellectual dishonesty. But beyond its complete inconsistency with Perry’s ideology and professed objectives, the analysis simply doesn’t make sense. Here are a few examples:

1)GDP growth is impossibly high: Remember that Heritage Foundation analysis of the House Republican 2012 Budget, the one that predicted economic growth and unemployment at levels most economists considered impossible? Well, John Dunham and Associates’ (JDA) projections underpinning the analysis of Perry’s tax plan are even more impossibly higher! The Heritage analysis found that the average annual real growth rate from 2014-2020 would be about 3.1 percent. JDA is predicting that under Perry’s plan, it would be 5.3 percent. Reality’s overrated anyway, right?

2)Double counting: The analysis claims that “overall income is based on growth in nominal GDP and population (pg. 4).” See the problem here? Yeah, that’s right, nominal GDP already takes into account population growth. We checked their numbers, and it does appear they grew income by both GDP and population, so it doesn’t seem to be just a typo.

3)Other weird stuff: Check out the qualified dividends forecast from Table 2 of the analysis. From 2016-2019 dividends grow at an average 12.6 percent, including 13.2 percent in 2017, 14.0 percent in 2018, and 8.2 percent in 2019. And then 2020? Whoops. According to this forecast, qualified dividends in 2020 will be exactly the same as in 2019, to the dollar. Same thing with 2011 and 2012. The chance that that’s not a mistake is about zero.

4) Optional or mandatory?: It is unclear whether JDA modeled an optional flat tax or a mandatory flat tax as a replacement for the current income tax. The campaign maintains that JDA did model optionality. But their stated methodology does not mention how they modeled which taxpayers would choose which system, and their description of the proposal—”a 20 percent flat rate for both personal income taxes and corporate income taxes”—also makes no mention of having a choice between the current system and the new system.

We contacted the Perry campaign in regards to these numerous errors and omissions, but have yet to hear back. These aren’t minor problems – the entire analysis is suspect and the Perry campaign should retract these numbers.

At EPI’s 25th anniversary celebration last night, we presented an award to Paul Krugman. (You know, because he’s short on credentials and really could use some professional validation.) Harry Hanbury produced a very candid video about him for us, and it’s well worth seeing – it’s not just a hymn of praise, it actually has a great narrative arc.

I think the only thing I’d add that the video didn’t emphasize (because it was made for people, not economists) is just how inspiring Krugman’s work is for economists who are actually trying to make sense of the real world. Nobody else so consistently reaches back for the tools that we’re all taught in grad schools (many of which he built, it bears saying) – tools like graphs and equations and models that often seem dry and abstract – and holds them up against developments in the real world to see what they actually can and can’t explain. He runs with the things that are useful and (often pretty brutally) discards the things that aren’t. For those of us who got into the economics business to understand the world around us, his work is an inspiration.

A clear trend is developing among the economic plans of the GOP presidential hopefuls: shift the burden of taxation from upper-income to lower-income households. Yesterday, the Tax Policy Center released an analysis concluding that Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s plan would cut taxes on high-income households, raise taxes on low- and middle-income households, and produce bigger deficits. The gist of Perry’s plan is to add an optional federal income tax to the current code: a flat 20 percent tax on (almost all) income less personal exemptions, charitable giving, home mortgage interest, state and local taxes, and all capital gains and dividends income (aptly dubbed an “Alternative Maximum Tax” by Howard Gleckman).

Meanwhile, Perry’s plan appears to let the Bush-era tax cuts expire in 2013, meaning that lower-income households would lose their expanded earned income tax credit, child tax credit, and the 10 percent bracket. (The John Dunham and Associates analysis for the Perry campaign uses a current law baseline and TPC also concluded that the Bush-era tax cuts would expire on schedule.) The Bush-era tax cuts were regressive and disproportionately benefited upper-income households, but a fractionof these tax cuts have gone to lower- and middle-class households; Perry would effectively do away with these tax cuts while giving higher-income households an even bigger tax cut. This would mean an average tax increase of over $400 for households earning between $20,000 and $40,000. Although this may appear at odds with Perry’s anti-tax ideology, higher taxes for the poor and middle class is in fact entirely consistent with his misleading rhetoric lambasting the “injustice” that nearly half of households don’t pay federal income taxes.

The chart below depicts TPC’s analysis of effective tax rates by cash income level under Perry’s plan versus current policy. On average, households with income under $50,000 see a tax hike. Above this level, tax cuts balloon as income rises. Millionaires would be left paying a lower effective tax rate than a middle class family earning between $50,000 and $75,000. This completely violates the idea of a progressive tax code and the Buffett Rule.

Click to enlarge

The natural result of modestly raising taxes on working families while slashing taxes for upper-income households is hemorrhaging revenue: this is not about “shared sacrifice” or the budget deficit. As my colleague Ethan Pollack points out, the Perry campaign relies on highly dishonest dynamic scoring to claim their tax code produces more revenue. Official budget scorekeepers incorporate behavioral responses but not dynamic growth effects into tax policy analysis, because research shows growth effects are generally small and can break either way depending on how tax cuts are financed (see this CBPP overview of dynamic scoring). TPC’s static model shows Perry’s plan losing $995 billion relative to current law, a decrease of 27 percent, in calendar year 2015 alone ($570 billion relative to the inadequate levels projected under current policy).

Working households would get hammered again when that additional revenue loss is financed with draconian spending cuts, as required by the balanced budget amendment and spending cap component of Perry’s economic plan. This is merely a plan to dismantle government and refund all the savings, plus some of working families’ disposable income, to upper-income households.

I’ve been reading through Rick Perry’s official analysis of his tax plan (scored by John Dunham and Associates), and hoo boy, it’s a doozy. Difficult to know where to begin.

The intellectual dishonesty is breath-taking. The basic conservative argument that tax cuts increase economic growth goes like this: tax cuts for the rich results in more capital formation, which fuels greater productivity and higher economic growth. In other words, supply-side growth with demand catching up. It’s a pretty ridiculous model in the face of huge demand shortages, but hey, at least it’s a model.

But as Matt Rognlie points out, the model that Rick Perry used is very different, and in fact has a lot more in common with traditional Keynesian demand-side economic models than conservative supply-side models. In fact, this economic model (called IMPLAN) is usually used to justify government public works projects, such as sports stadiums, because this model shows that the economy can be significantly improved through government spending.

Wait, what? Rick Perry’s using an economic model that shows that government spending helps the economy? That’s right, partner. In fact, the IMPLAN model (which we’re decently familiar with at EPI) will actually show that spending cuts reduce demand more than tax cuts boost it (because a portion of the tax cuts are saved), so the net effect is likely negative. And to be clear, JDA did assume that the plan would cut spending by the same amount as the revenue loss (page 7, footnote 7).

So how did the analysis show a positive economic impact? Simple: they assumed the spending cuts, but didn’t model them, despite the fact that it’s logically inconsistent to claim that tax cuts have an effect on demand but spending cuts don’t. The only reason they got a positive economic impact was because they did not model the entire plan. Had they, it’s pretty clear that the analysis would have shown that Perry’s overall budget plan—tax cuts paired with offsetting spending cuts—would, on net, hurt jobs and economic growth.

Here’s something really scary for Halloween: the plan being pushed in the budget super committee by Alice Rivlin, Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles to cut Social Security benefits by changing the way inflation is measured. Any member of Congress who goes along with this plan will deservedly be as popular as a vampire at a blood drive.

Retirees living on Social Security are mostly just scraping by. The average retirement benefit is only about $14,000 a year in 2009, and most retirees depend on Social Security for half or more of their incomes. Knowing how tight their budgets are (and their proclivity for voting), Democrats and Republicans alike have promised not to cut the benefits of people nearing retirement, not to mention the benefits of people who have already retired. Yet the only way the inflation measure can reduce the deficit over the next 10 years is by cutting Social Security cost-of-living adjustments for current and near retirees.

The members of Congress who want to make this benefit cut don’t want to admit they’re breaking their promises to retirees. So they disguise the cuts as a technical change—an improvement in the cost-of-living measure. That’s hogwash. The alternative index they propose for the Social Security COLA is not an improvement over the current measure; it’s almost certainly a worse indicator of the rising cost of living faced by seniors. And there’s nothing technical about its expected effect on retirees’ checks. The COLA reductions it will cause will cost the average retiree about $1,700 a year by 2031.

Social Security’s annual cost-of-living adjustment is based on the Consumer Price Index for Urban Wage Earners and Clerical Workers, or CPI-W. Ironically, the CPI-W measures changes in the cost of living for workers, excluding retirees and other Social Security recipients who aren’t in the labor force. This measure doesn’t accurately reflect the cost of living for seniors. Seniors have experienced higher inflation because they spend a greater share of their incomes on out-of-pocket medical expenses, and health costs have risen faster than overall inflation in recent decades. An index that specifically tracks the cost of living of seniors has risen roughly 0.27 percentage points faster per year than the CPI-W.

The rationale for the change the super committee is contemplating is that the current price index overstates inflation because it doesn’t fully account for the ability of consumers to change their buying habits in response to price changes. In other words, if the price of oranges goes up, people will buy more apples and fewer oranges, and this change isn’t fully reflected in the CPI-W even though the consumption “basket” evolves over time to put more weight on apples and less on oranges.

The problem with this argument is that it doesn’t look at the growth in the costs actual retirees face over time. Not only are seniors harder hit by escalating medical costs than the working-age population, but since they have roughly half the household incomes, they spend a greater share on necessities like rent and utilities. It’s likely that the CPI change advocated in the super committee will understate inflation in the goods and services the elderly mostly purchase, and it may actually overstate their ability to change consumption habits in response to price changes. No one disputes that it will lead to benefit cuts that start small but compound over time.

Benefit cuts are justly unpopular across the political spectrum—especially cuts that affect retirees and near-retirees. But Republican members of Congress have a double problem. The CPI change would affect income taxes, too – not just Social Security and veterans’ benefits. How does anyone who took a no-tax-increase pledge defend voting for a “technical change” that will raise $72 billion in taxes by 2021 on tens of millions of Americans? They might be tempted, since there will be nearly $2 of Social Security cuts for every $1 of increased tax revenue. But at the end of the day a vote for the CPI change will feed the disgust of Tea Party types as much as progressives and liberals.

Former Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall released his new book, Value-Added Immigration: Lessons for the United States from Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, at a forum at EPI this morning. The book examines the employment-based immigration policies of the principal immigration-receiving countries and contrasts their data and evidence-based policy development with our own very partisan policy making, which has been governed by ideology and interest group advantage rather than a rational examination of the national interest.

Marshall made clear at this morning’s forum that a realistic hope for progress depends on putting one federal agency in charge, gathering data for informed decision-making, and committing ourselves to pursuit of a high value-added immigration policy, rather than simply a pursuit of cheap labor. Unlike Australia and Canada, which track the experience of immigrants in longitudinal studies and adjust their policies to improve outcomes, the United States does not even know how many “temporary” non-immigrant workers are legally in the U.S., let alone how they are faring.

Marshall was joined on a panel by three distinguished researchers: Philip Martin of the University of California, Davis, one of the nation’s foremost experts on agricultural economics and labor migration; Michael S. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and Harvard Law School, a demographer and expert on STEM education and immigration; and Ron Hira, of the Rochester Institute of Technology, an expert on the offshoring of IT work and the relationship between our non-immigrant visa programs and the health of the domestic engineering and computer science workforces.

Martin and Teitelbaum, like Secretary Marshall, praised the flexibility of the Australian and Canadian systems and their use of rational, objective point systems to determine the admission of skilled immigrants. Each also praised the U.K.’s Migration Advisory Committee for its collection and use of very extensive labor shortage statistics, its use of “bottoms up” information from local businesses, unions and government sources, and its non-partisan method of researching, reporting, and analyzing whether importing workers is the sensible way to solve particular problems. All three commenters agreed with Marshall that the current state of immigration and labor market data in the U.S. is far inferior to that in the countries studied and inadequate to the task of informing the policy debate.

GDP grew at 2.5 percent in the third quarter – and that seems to be about the growth rate to expect for the next year (which will be an improvement from the 1.6 percent growth that has characterized the most recent 12 months). This is, as we’ve noted, insufficient to drive down the 9.1 percent unemployment rate.

It is, however, worth remembering just why there are so many unemployed workers in the country: the depth and length of the Great Recession, caused by the bursting housing bubble (and perhaps amplified by the corresponding financial crisis). The unemployment rate is slightly down and employment growth since the recession ended in the middle of 2009 is actually roughly in-line with the recoveries we’ve seen in the past two decades (following the 1990 and 2001 recessions). Further, to the degree that the current recovery is slightly under-performing these previous two, it’s in the hemorrhaging of public sector jobs.

So why is unemployment so much higher today compared to nine quarters after these two other recessions ended? Because the output losses (and hence corresponding job-losses) suffered during the Great Recession were so much larger – meaning that we have a much larger overhang of economic slack (both unemployed workers and idle factories) to put back to work.

The figure below shows GDP declines during the Great Recession compared to these previous two recessions, as well as GDP gains nine quarters into recovery for the Great Recession and the previous recessions.

Click to enlarge

As we’ve also observed before, recoveries from recessions happened much more quickly in the years prior to 1990, reflecting in part that monetary policy was much more effective in driving recoveries pre-1990 (since it was generally monetary policy tightness that caused these recessions, monetary loosening could hence lead to rapid recovery).

So, focusing for a second on just those recessions that have happened in the two decades (give or take a year), we see something clear – this recovery lags the average by 1.1 percent of GDP, but the hole left by the recession was larger by an average of 4.5 percent of GDP, meaning roughly that it was the difference in the losses caused by the recession that explain 80 percent of why unemployment is so high relative to its pre-recession level.

So while it’s true that we slightly lag the pace of post-1990s’ recoveries, it is clear that what really explains why so many more workers and so much more capital remains idle today compared to recoveries past is just how ferocious the preceding recession was.

Does this leave today’s policymakers off the hook? No – they should do more. The past is the past and just because a problem is inherited doesn’t mean it shouldn’t or can’t be solved. Clearly in retrospect not enough was done to boost the economy following the 1990 and 2001 recessions (some speculative reasons why are here). And clearly there is more we can do now to boost the sluggish demand growth that is the main cause of today’s economy operating below potential.

But, it is worth remembering where the problem came from. As we get further and further from the Great Recession, the temptation is great to act as if citing it as the root cause of today’s problems is just unseemly dwelling on the past and dodging blame. But, really, it does matter how it all started.

Rick Perry’s out with his tax plan, and while he might be winning the “who can pander to their base the most” award—beating out strong efforts by Mitt Romney and Herman Cain—his proposal proves to be an utter disaster for the economy and the middle class.

On the tax side, the plan would do the following:

Replace the graduated income tax with an optional 20 percent flat rate with a slightly broader base

Second, he claims that his plan will simplify the tax code, so simple that you can “file your taxes on a postcard.” Yet his tax code is optional, meaning that millions of households will have to do their taxes twice to see under which code they should file (and if they think they might be subject to the Alternative Minimum Tax, they’ll have to do their taxes three times!). Layering another tax code over the current one makes filing taxes more complicated, not less.

From Flickr Creative Commons by Gage Skidmore

Now, it’s certainly the case that the tax code is too complex. But it’s telling that his proposal doesn’t even attempt to tackle the issue of unfairness, which has sparked protests across the country. Most people hear that Warren Buffet pays a lower tax rate than his secretary and conclude that he should be taxed at a higher rate, one more comparable to middle-class workers. Rick Perry, however, thinks his taxes should be cut even further.

And how does he pay for these tax cuts? No surprise here: massive cuts to the social safety net and public investments. He’d raise the Social Security retirement age, potentially raise the Medicare eligibility age, eliminate all the expanded health insurance coverage in the Affordable Care Act, and take an axe to non-defense discretionary spending, which has already been slashed by the Budget Control Act.

It’s the basic conservative approach to budget and tax policy: (1) pretend that you care about deficits, (2) give huge tax cuts to corporations and the top 1 percent, and (3) slash the very programs that people depend on because now we “can’t afford them.” The rich get richer, and even more risk and cost is pushed onto the middle- and low-income households that can least bear the burden. Perry may call this tax plan “fair.” but I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means.

So this Halloween season, the middle class might want to skip Perry’s house, because for them he’s got no treats, only cruel, cruel tricks.

Nonresidential investment has been growing rapidly for quite some time – seven straight quarters averaging 10.5 percent growth. We have noted before that this provides powerful evidence that business fear of future regulatory uncertainty seems to be an odd explanation of sluggish economic growth – businesses are, in fact, actually spending pretty quickly during the recovery.

Is it a puzzle that nonresidential investment is coming on two years of rapid growth, yet employment growth remains sluggish? After all, if businesses seem fine in taking on new machines, why aren’t they fine in taking on new staff?

I’d argue the answer to these questions are ‘not really’ and ‘read on.’

First, it’s worth remembering that nonresidential investment just isn’t that big a part of the overall economy – it has averaged 11.1 percent of GDP since 1995 and sits at 10.3 percent today. While it’s nice that it’s performing well, it just doesn’t have enough heft by itself to drive overall trends in either output or employment growth. Contrast this with consumer spending sitting at about 70 percent or more of total GDP.

Second, nonresidential investment is hugely cyclical – from the last quarter of 2007 to its trough in the second quarter of 2009, it fell by 22.4 percent – or about 2.5 times farther than the drop in employment. Today, despite its good growth for nearly two years, it remains well below trend. In fact, Thursday’s report on third quarter GDP shows that the simple level of nonresidential investment remains nearly 8 percent below its pre-recession peak. So, it’s been growing very well for a while now, but it fell extraordinarily far during the recession.

Third, it’s important to remember that, like job-growth, investment has to grow just to keep overall economic slack stable. So, we need roughly 100,000 jobs each month just to keep the unemployment rate stable while absorbing new labor market entrants. And, we need 8 percent of GDP to be invested each year just to keep the overall capital stock from shrinking through depreciation that occurs in the private business sector.

Lastly, it’s worth asking whether investment is now so high after seven straight quarters of growth that it is threatening to change the economy’s capital/labor ratio in an appreciable way. That is, firms invest so that each worker has a useful bundle of capital to work with – one that hopefully grows over time and makes each worker more productive. If investment per worker begins rising well above trend, this could mean that output is just becoming more capital-intensive for some unspecified reason or that firms will have to start soon hiring to stabilize this ratio.

Neither seems particularly likely – investment per worker remains below its 2007 level even as employment shrank over that period. And this means that it remains well below what a simple extrapolation of the pre-recession trend would argue.

Click to enlarge

In short, the trend in nonresidential investment is nice, but it won’t by itself bring about a robust recovery. More importantly, it mostly represents simply an ongoing climb out of a steep, recession-induced hole (which should sound familiar) combined with an attempt to run ahead of simple depreciation. And this trend certainly presents no puzzle in that it’s not being accompanied by more rapid hiring.

In Dec. 2008, the U.S. auto industry stood on the brink of collapse. The Obama administration negotiated a restructuring plan for the industry that took General Motors and Chrysler through quick bankruptcies, helped get them back on their feet again, and provided bridge financing for auto parts makers and auto finance companies. This plan was widely criticized at the time but restructuring has paid big dividends for the nation, autoworkers and the domestic auto industry.

GM, Ford and Chrysler have bargained new labor agreements with the UAW, recently approved by workers at each company, which will ensure increased employment and investments in the United States by all three firms. The completion of these agreements and the strong improvement in the performance of U.S. automakers shows that the Obama administration made a wise decision to invest in the auto industry restructuring package. If the industry had been allowed to fail, costs to federal, state and local governments in the form of reduced tax payments and increased unemployment compensation would have totaled between $83 billion and $249 billion in 2009 alone.

The auto industry restructuring plan has yielded a huge return on taxpayer investment and put the industry and its workers on a solid path to recovery. I estimate the federal, state and local governments saved between $10 and $78 for every net dollar invested in auto industry restructuring—a very savvy investment at a time when failure to intervene would have been catastrophic for the domestic economy.

The Congressional Budget Office released a report yesterday that provides more detail into their hugely valuable reporting on household income growth at different points in the income distribution. There’s plenty to dig into here, but, we’ll start with just noting that the report confirms what we posted today: that the primary complaint of the Occupy Wall Street movement – that economic inequality is rising, and economic policy, driven by the interests of the already well-off, is driving that rise – is spot-on.

The CBO report focuses on 1979-2007 – the last year before the Great Recession. While inequality actually tends to fall in the immediate aftermath of recessions (as incomes derived from the stock market fall more quickly than others, and these incomes are disproportionately claimed by the richest households), we know that over this period that inequality has always risen very sharply after the immediate recession-years.

One immediate comparison that comes to mind when examining data on inequality is a simple comparison of the growth of mean versus median income between 1979 and 2007. Mean income is just the simple average – it’s essentially how much the economy was able to generate on a per household basis. Median income growth is a measure of how a household smack in the middle of the distribution – poorer than half of households but richer than half – has done over the same period. If income growth is much faster for already-rich households (and it definitely was over this period) then mean income growth is going to outpace median growth. And, we can ask how much households at the median could be earning today if their income growth matched the overall average. This doesn’t seem too much to ask in terms of economic outcomes – the richest 1 percent in 1979 made considerably more than the typical household – so even if all incomes had simply grown at the overall average rate, there would be a considerable income gap today. Instead, of course, median growth fell far below average growth. If it hadn’t, the CBO data indicates that the median household would have had $75,160 in after-tax income in 2007, rather than the $61,800 it actually had.

In short, the inequality driven by households at the top claiming so much of the overall growth acted as a $13,360 tax on the median household. I should note that those used to citing Census Bureau numbers on median incomes will find these income numbers to be high. That’s because these are a measure of “comprehensive income” that includes many things – like in-kind transfers and imputed taxes besides the money incomes reported by Census.

Click to enlarge

Speaking of taxes and transfers, we can also look at how policy most visibly affects income trends – looking at how taxes and transfers affect the evolution of inequality. Because the federal income tax is progressive and because transfers (Social Security, unemployment insurance, Medicare, Medicaid) make up a larger share of low- and moderate-income households’ incomes, the effect of taxes and transfers overall is to, at any given point in time, reduce the inequality that results from market-based incomes (though, to be clear, policy has fingerprints all over market-based incomes as well).

But, the CBO notes that “shifts in the distribution of government transfer payments and federal taxes also contributed to the increase in after-tax income inequality.” See the chart below from the CBO report and focus on the top-line. This top line shows the contribution that taxes and transfers make to reducing inequality – and it shows this contribution has fallen significantly between 1979 and 2007. That is, this most visible hand of policy – the effect of taxes and transfers – has actually changed in the direction of increasing inequality (or reducing it less) relative to its 1979 levels. In short, tax and transfer policy is leaning with the wind of rising inequality rather than against it.

The CBO report is just one more valuable piece of evidence adding to the overwhelming case that economic policy needs to be reoriented to insure that our economy starts generating fairer outcomes.

EPI has strung together a series of posts and papers on why regulatory changes enacted and proposed in the past couple of years are clearly not a contributor to the economy’s sluggish recovery from the Great Recession. We’ve been especially critical of the vague claims that “uncertainty” over regulatory change has dampened job-growth. Basically, we’ve done the analysis that anti-regulatory forces have not done – specified just what the evidence would look like if regulatory change or uncertainty was dampening growth and then examining the actual facts-on-the-ground to see if it was consistent with the story. Punchline: it wasn’t.

But we’re just EPI and the debate has seemed a bit lonely; until now.

The Treasury Department, in an important blog post, has reviewed the evidence that we cited and more to assess the case for regulatory changes or uncertainty stifling growth – and they find it as content-free as we did.

Treasury cites low hours per employee (yet to regain their pre-recession peak), low rates of capacity utilization, low bond-rates (even for industries facing regulatory changes), and low rates of financial volatility – along with high profit margins and high rates of investment in equipment and software – as all bolstering the case against regulatory uncertainty as a prime suspect for dampening economic recovery.

As we explained previously, low rates of capacity utilization and average hours per employee argue against regulatory uncertainty as a driver of sluggish growth because even if firms were reluctant, because of uncertainty, to make new permanent commitments to staff or investments, there’s no reason why future uncertainty would cause them to under-utilize their incumbent labor force and capacity. Slack demand, of course, would cause them to under-utilize these. Low bond rates and financial volatility argues that financial markets sure don’t see future uncertainty that needs to be priced into interest rates charged to American business. High rates of profit argue that nothing – not regulatory burden or anything else – has hampered business profitability – and high rates of investment in computers and software argues that businesses lack of spending is not the prime cause for sluggish growth in general. It’s amazing that just three years removed from the absolute meltdown of the most conspicuous experiment in market self-regulation over the past decades, the GOP Congress wants to argue that it’s excessive regulation that is stifling the economy, without providing an iota of evidence.

The Treasury’s post is very encouraging in that it signals an administration that has decisively rejected this view and seems determined to follow the evidence in continuing to push for smart, well-studied regulatory changes without worrying that they’re somehow strangling the recovery. In recent weeks, President Obama himself has undertaken some increasingly powerful pushback on that portion of the GOP jobs-agenda that consists simply of “deregulate.” These developments, along with the administration’s proposal and advocacy for the American Jobs Act show a genuinely fact-based commitment to doing what would really work (and ignoring what wouldn’t) to reduce unemployment.

This is the first entry in a series of commentaries on the economic philosophies of the major candidates for the 2012 presidential election. Only candidates who have consistently polled at or near 10 percent are included, which at the start of this project includes Republicans Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), Rep. Ron Paul (Texas), Newt Gingrich, Gov. Rick Perry (Texas), Herman Cain, and Mitt Romney. The series will conclude with President Barack Obama.

A Look at Michele Bachmann’s economic worldview

“In my perfect world, we’d take the 35 percent corporate tax rate down to nine so that we’re the most competitive in the industrialized world. Zero out capital gains. Zero out the alternative minimum tax. Zero out the death tax.” — Bachmann as quoted in the Wall Street Journal

The Minnesota representative’s economic program is vague on specifics but generally conforms to what other Republican candidates have advocated. Bachmann has been most forceful in her desire to repeal Obamacare the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). Another key plank in her platform is cutting government spending to get deficits under control. Yet, repealing PPACA would actually add to deficit according to the Congressional Budget Office. Conveniently, Mrs. Bachmann dismisses the CBO report and has dismissed other non-partisan reports when careful research counters her assertions. That’s her right, I suppose. It would be nice, though, if she would substantiate her rhetoric. Just saying.

Reagan reference

“For my tax plan, I take a page out of one of my great economists that I admire, Ronald Reagan. And under my tax plan I want to adopt the Reagan tax plan. It brought the economic miracle of the 1980s. Why not go with what works? You can’t argue with success. I want to reinstitute the Reagan tax model from the 1980s.” — Bachmann on Fox News

From Flickr Creative Commons by Gage Skidmore

I will assume Bachmann was attempting humor by calling Reagan an economist. It is funny, though, that she doesn’t view the economic performance of the Clinton years as worthy of replicating, despite the fact those years brought higher growth and balanced budgets.

Take a canard, any canard

A recent Bachmann fave is to talk about excessive regulation driving up employer costs and limiting jobs. This notion is, in fact largely wrong and dismisses the benefits of regulation (see this EPI report). Several weeks ago, Bachmann railed against regulation at an Iowa meat packing plant and said the food industry is over-regulated. Interestingly, a well-regarded study that surveyed food industry managers found that only a small minority thought the industry was too regulated, about the same number thought it wasn’t regulated enough, and the vast majority felt the industry was regulated just right.

Declaration of independence

Bachmann and Ron Paul, though signatories to a pledge to condition a debt ceiling increase on so-called “Cut, Cap and Balance” legislation, opposed their party’s efforts to do so. Alas, her ultimate disagreement wasn’t that the cut, cap and balance approach would wreak economic devastation (see this EPI Commentary), but that it wasn’t extreme enough because it did not repeal and defund the PPACA.

Guiding principles

“I will demand a return to our Founders’ vision of smaller, smarter government within the enumerated powers laid out in the Constitution.” — Bachmann campaign website

That statement is part of Bachmann’s platform on budgets and deficits and seems to be the guiding principle for her presidential platform. This assessment of the Founding Fathers has long been part of the Republican catechism, yet it is simply not true.

First, the Founders were not a monolithic bloc. Even someone not well versed in the specifics of American history understands the general arc of why the republic was formed: Our constitution, which she asserts is her guiding document, resulted from the failure of the Articles of Confederation, our first governing structure, to deliver necessary results. The Articles made the federal government subordinate to state governments, a circumstance Founder Alexander Hamilton described as “inconsistent with every idea of vigor and consistency.” Hamilton and other founding figures like James Madison, George Washington and Benjamin Franklin were proponents of a federal government empowered to do what was necessary to advance the United States so long as the people consented.

A principal reason, remember, for abandoning the Articles was government’s inability to pay its debts. I say with great confidence that the Federalist founders would have strongly disagreed with Bachmann’s position during the debt ceiling debate.

Don’t get me wrong—the federalists were not always right, nor did they unanimously agree. That’s actually the point. Asserting that there was a singular founding vision for this country demonstrates, at best, poor understanding of our history.

Every month, the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases updated data on the employment and unemployment situation facing each state. We, in turn, provide a quick analysis of these new data, a process which has for the most part consisted of finding new ways to highlight how truly dismal this recovery has been for virtually every state. And while the data on employment and unemployment trends present a mixed bag of late — with far too many states making negative progress towards economic recovery, one measure that gets far too little media attention is the state level “jobs deficit” — the number of jobs needed to get back to pre-recession unemployment rates (including the jobs required to return to pre-recession level AND the jobs needed to keep up with population growth since the beginning of the recession).

For states with the greatest population growth, employing a growing population and workforce during a recession can be challenging. The data show that of the 10 states with the greatest population growth since Dec. 2009 (the beginning of the recession), six of those states — Colorado, Arizona, North Carolina, Georgia, South Carolina, and Idaho — fall in the top 10 in terms of the current jobs deficit as a percent of Dec. 2009 employment. As seen in Figure 1, there are distinct regional patterns, with states in the West and Southeast facing the largest jobs deficits as a percentage of pre-recession employment.

State governors have been quick to pat themselves on the back when they have positive employment growth to report. Indeed, the governor of Texas has made his track record on job creation a centerpiece of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination. Yet these jobs deficit numbers highlight the fact that even Texas has a long way to go to erase its jobs deficit. If one looks at the number of jobs required to erase state jobs deficits, Texas has the third largest jobs deficit to address — 654,700 jobs — behind California (1,781,100 jobs deficit) and Florida (973,300 jobs deficit). Figure 2 shows the number of jobs each state must create in order to erase the jobs deficit that continues to impede economic recovery throughout the nation. Only North Dakota has successfully erased its jobs deficit, showing growth of 19,500 jobs beyond the employment level needed to get back to pre-recession unemployment rates.

America works best when Americans work. Since it will take some time to make inroads on the 11.6 million national jobs deficit, state and national leaders should continue extended unemployment insurance benefits, and boost wages for those who are working by increasing the minimum wage. Until every state has successfully returned to pre-recession levels, state and national leaders need to focus like a laser on creating quality jobs that contribute to shared prosperity and a moral economy.

His opposition to the American Jobs Act was premised in an objection to progressive taxation (masquerading as concern for soup kitchens and the poor). Blocking funds to keep teachers in classrooms—exacerbating the widening teacher gap—will, of course, impede upward mobility. Now, he manages to turn concern about inequality into an argument against progressive taxation:

“Instead of talking about a fair share or spending time trying to push those at the top down, elected leaders in Washington should be trying to ensure that everyone has a fair shot and the opportunity to earn success up the ladder. The goal shouldn’t be for everyone to meet in the middle of the ladder. We should want all people to be moving up and no one to be pulled down. How do we do that? It cannot simply be about wealth redistribution. You don’t just take from the guy at the top to give to the guy at the bottom and expect our problems to be solved.

Instead, we must ensure fairness at every level. We must ensure that those who abuse the rules are punished. We must ensure that the solution to wealth disparity is wealth mobility. We must give everyone the chance to move up. Stability plus mobility equals agility. In an agile economy and an agile society, people are climbing and succeeding.”

Slashing the top corporate tax rates on individuals and businesses to 25 percent, then “broadening the base” to recoup this $2.5 trillion revenue loss through unspecified reforms. Who picks up the tab? Probably low and middle-income households